'89: A Milk extract
Though our Canberra Raiders didn't knock over Parramatta Eels as many, er, experts predicted, we did re-sign Joe Tapine and in 1989 won the greatest grand final ever played. So there is that. x
Well. That didn’t go very well. And on a crisp and fine night at CommBank Stadium we were verily and quite righteously pounded by Parramatta Eels, who deserved to win.
Watching it back, though, we were unlucky not to put 3-4 more tries on the board that would’ve changed the complexion (if not the result) of the game, while each of our errors was taken full advantage of by Parramatta Eels who, again, deserved to win and just might even upset Penrith Panthers on Sunday.
In other news we did re-sign Joseph Tapine for good as ever, so that’s smoking for next season. Top, top news. And for mine we’re top-4 will a bullet in the ‘23.
And if we get John Bateman back we win the job lot.
In less fanciful though no less exciting news, follows is an extract about the ‘89 grand final in The Milk, the book about 40 years of the Canberra Raiders that you can purchase now for the very special price of $30 including postage and a personally-inscribed hand-written note in the front cover.
For $50 we’ll send you two copies.
So. Plonk yourself on the couch with a coffee and a Chocolate Monte, and have a good long read. It’s as fun to read as it was to write.
Up The Milk!
GAME 4
‘89
Canberra Raiders 19 defeated Balmain Tigers 14
Sydney Football Stadium
Sunday, September 24, 1989
I watched the 1989 grand final at my mate Barry’s place beside an Esky full of those little VB ‘throw-downs’; 250 mills of nutty, hoppy goodness. And you couldn’t sit down for watching it. It was a game, by the end, with the players dusted in the brown soil of the Sydney Football Stadium, you had to keep getting up and moving around, and coming back, and gawking through splayed fingers at the ever-unfolding melodrama. What the hell is going on? What can possibly happen next? What, dear sweet Moose Mossop, is the meaning of this?
The fine big, two-headed Winfield Cup popped up on the screen and commentator Rex Mossop - the great ‘Moose’, a man whose ego could only just fit in the commentary box with Ian ‘The Bear’ Maurice, Graeme ‘Heaps’ Hughes and Bill ‘Bill’ Anderson - gave a throaty chuckle.
“There it is; that’s what they’re going through all this agony for. A truly great grand final. I don’t normally eulogise the game. I’ve been watching grand finals for 35 years. I can’t think of a game that’s gripped me as much as this one,” Mossop said and the TV audience could only agree. Spot on, old Moose. This is a flat-out ball-tearer.
First half the Raiders were on top. Yet Balmain led 12-2 at half-time after Paul Sironen … it’s almost cliché to describe it. You’ll have seen it. But here it is:
Minutes to half-time there’s a play-the-ball 40 metres out from the Balmain line. Steve Roach is blindside on the right and notes that John Ferguson is back deep on his wing, expecting a kick. Roach calls for the ball from Elias, who dishes a back-hander under pressure from Laurie Daley. Roach’s eyes light up. He’s got Dean Lance in front of him and Andy Currier outside. He draws Lance, takes the front-on tackle and dishes to Currier – unmarked.
The skilful Pom tip-toes bare centimetres from the sideline before hoisting a booming Garryowen on the fly. Gary Belcher, probably best on ground, lets the ball bounce (later Mal Meninga will chide him for it, and roughly) before winger James Grant gathers the ball from a ridiculous, tangential bounce. As he’s collared by Belcher and flung into touch, Grant flings the ball back inside to Currier who finds a jolly good man on his left: Sirro. And the big man is flying, a quarter-horse at full tilt. And dear sweet baby Bradley Clyde, good as he is, your Clive Churchill Medallist, cannot bring the juggernaut to halter. Try-time Tigers. And they are cock-a-hoop.
Sironen’s head popped up on screen. “There he is,” Mossop declared. “Big as a draught horse, as fast as your ordinary back. Twenty-four years old. A policeman. I wouldn’t have anything to do with him if I was in trouble.”
The two coaches and their assistants left their hot boxes and arrived at the same time at the elevator on the third floor of the Sydney Football Stadium Members Stand. According to a cracking three-part piece by Billy Rule in The Daily Telegraph the scene “was like a modern day spaghetti western.”
“As they stepped into the lift Tim Sheens and his assistant coach Phil Foster discovered they were in the same confined space as Warren Ryan and his coaching coordinator Brian Satterley.
“Foster looked at Sheens, Sheens looked at Foster. Ryan looked at Satterley, Satterley looked at Ryan. Sheens looked at Ryan, Ryan looked at Sheens. There were plenty of eyeballs moving but no one spoke.
“Then, just as the elevator arrived at their destination, Foster broke the silence. ‘We should be in front,’ he said to Sheens. ‘We’ll get these blokes.’
“The eyeballs again. Left, right, straight, across, down, up. But soon the doors slid open and the men went their separate ways.
“As the Canberra pair fell in with each other, Sheens asked Foster: ‘What the hell did you say that for?’
“Foster replied: ‘Well, it gives them something to think about, doesn’t it?’
“Sheens shook his head and laughed and they headed off to see the players,” Rule wrote.
The second half was punctuated by Elias’s drop goal that wasn’t. When it hit the crossbar, Hughes roared: “What else can happen?” The answer was: Heaps, Heaps.
Bill Harrigan penalised Bruce McGuire for using a retreating, out-of-play defender, Steve Walters, as a blocker, like an American football player using an opponent as a shield. McGuire had been tackled but Walters wasn’t back on the mark so the Tigers second-rower tapped and went. Walters came back into the play but put his hands up as if to say, I’m not involved here. McGuire pushed Walters towards the encroaching Clyde, slightly ducked behind him, and stepped off his left into space. Harrigan blew a penalty. McGuire was like … A shepherd? I had the ball, Bill!
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a play – much less a penalty – like it before or since. Even today Tigers fans will harangue Harrigan about it and he will tell them in the cuddly-feely way of rugby league: Here’s 20 cents, pal. Go ring someone who cares.
Time ticked down. The Tigers ran a play designed to expose the lateral movement of Meninga, whom Ryan believed ponderous and vulnerable: Dummy-half Elias to Roach, a switch with Gary Freeman, a dummy run by McGuire draws Meninga’s attention before Freeman hits Micky Neil with a beautiful flat pass that the little five-eighth fairly flies onto. He’s in, surely. Meninga is done like a dinner. Yet just as it seems Neil has won the game the big fellow dives full stretch to ankle-tap and bring the No.6 down.
At Barry’s place we were incoherent. This is unbelievable.
Then Wok Ryan took Roach off. Roach wouldn’t go and told his replacement, Kevin Hardwick, to, quote, “fuck off”, then made to pack into a scrum. Harrigan informed Roach the game would not restart until he left the field. And so off walked The Block, doing his block, refusing Hardwick’s handshake, at his own stately pace.
Six minutes to go: Elias’s field goal hit the post.
Four minutes to go: NSWRL general manager John Quayle instructed his people to prepare for a Balmain victory presentation.
Two minutes to go: Canberra was 12 metres out from Balmain’s line. Dummy half Chris O’Sullivan pointed right behind his pants but went left and bombed. Garry Jack, Currier and Steve Jackson all leapt for possession but the ball found Daley who parried and flung an overhead netball pass to Ferguson who was expected to go wide but who jinked and stepped and jinked again - perhaps five times in the space of one of those telephone boxes that would accept Harrigan’s 20 cent piece except they’re now free - and, somehow, with Sironen and Hardwick upon him, dear old 35-year-old Chicka Ferguson, Canberra’s most popular Ferguson, rolled over to plant the ball near the posts.
And at Barry’s place we just about shat.
And the neighbours were roaring, too, across fences, you could hear them. People at barbies across Tuggeranong and the greater city, the one they reckoned had no soul, were up as one: What is going on? Somebody stop us we’ll kill again! Can you believe this game of rugby league!? This is unbeliiiieeevable!
I still can’t believe it. Sorry-not-sorry – objectively, subjectively, adjectively – as the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons would tell you: Best. Grand final. Ever. Even typing this gibber now and watching the game on YouTube, you’re riding plays, cheering. Owning it all again as old Les McIntyre once did in his fold-out recliner and his Milk Arrowroots.
And still there was drama to play out. It was like Pulp Fiction had another six or 10 really cool and exciting scenes to go after Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta) walked out of the diner in daggy T-shirts after convincing ‘Pumpkin’ (Tim Roth) that he should he take the $1,500 in Jules’ wallet, the one that says ‘Bad Mother Fucker’, and not the suitcase that contained whatever golden glowing thing we never see.
Back at the footy and Ryan made the understandable, tactical and – for Benny Elias and so many Tigers fans, never forgiven – decision to take off the big though lumbering Sironen and replace him with tough and mobile Mick Pobjie. Billy Anderson, bless him, put a microphone under Roach’s mouth and said: “You and Sirro both off. Gotta be a concern.” Roach mumbled something about the boys digging deep. But in his eyes he agreed. Yes, Bill. It is a concern. I am concerned.
Full-time. And the Raiders formed a huddle. Replacement forward Jackson of Queensland, a surprise inclusion onto the bench much less the field with 17 minutes to go as replacement for Brent Todd, became a surprise motivator.
“Have a fuckin’ look at ‘em!” Jackson said, motioning towards the Balmain players who were strewn about, eyes hollow, used up, spent.
“They are done! Look at ‘em!”
Both coaches had a hot minute with their men. Sheens had one instruction for Ricky Stuart: “Kick it, kick it, kick it.”
Stuart was the best – you could argue the greatest ever – kicker of the old leather Steeden. He’d practiced every day for hours with the more egg-shaped Adidas rugby ball. But he knew the league footy, too. And he could make the Steeden sing.
“He was the best kicker of the leather football in the game and both teams were tired,” Sheens told Tony Adams in Rugby League Week. “I was banking on Balmain getting bogged down in their own half.”
“Ricky Stuart’s kicking game was ideal for the situation,” Meninga said in his aptly-named biography Meninga. “We could keep it down their end and let them make mistakes.”
They did. Minutes into the cruel sea of extra-time and Stuart’s first kick torpedoed down field – where Jack dropped it. O’Sullivan told Stuart, “Give me the ball, I’m going to kick a field goal.” Stuart replied, “Don’t ask me. Ask Mal.” Meninga gave his assent.
From the scrum O’Sullivan dobbed the goal and punched the air. Mossop scolded: plenty of time left, son, I wouldn’t be celebrating.
But it was over – the Moose just didn’t know it. None of us did. But Balmain were cooked. Fork in ‘em, done. Pearce dropped the ball. McGuire dropped the ball. Spunky mullet-topped wing man Steve O’Brien, stubble of Don Johnson from Miami Vice glistening in the last golden lights of late afternoon gloaming, dropped the ball and mouthed a good frothy “fuck”. Mossop declared that while he would never advocate the use of that word, it was particularly apt given the error of O’Brien’s ways. He was a cracker, old Moose, a dinosaur in human form, they made one of Tooheys’ ‘How Do Ya Feel?’ beer ads out of his attempt to reel in a marlin from a fishing boat far out to sea.
And so, after nearly 100 minutes of frenetic, physical, all-action, interchange-free, dramatic – sweet Marlon Brando, the drama - rock-n-roll rugby league, the grand final developed a pace you once saw: players all doing their best, running their hardest, but going three-quarter pace. They were broken wildebeest, covered in dirt. Old lags talk about the power of fatigue on a game of footy. Balmain Tigers were like racehorses floundering up the home straight with a furlong to go in the Grand National at Ascot.
Thus when the Tigers swung it wide and Meninga scooped up Currier’s speculative, effete, nothing grubber, and swung a pass to Jackson, a man who had signed with the Raiders for $500, who wouldn’t have been playing had the Raiders’ reserve grade not been knocked out by Parramatta Eels in extra-time of the preliminary final, who’d found out he’d be on the bench on the Thursday, who wasn’t invited to the grand final breakfast, who didn’t expect to get on, and who would never play for the Raiders again, the ball was in the hands of one of the freshest men on the field.
And the Tigers were not fresh. And became like bad bollards. Ineffective bollards. The worst kind of bollards. Bollards unable to fulfil their sole remit. And Jackson - whose only thought on receiving the ball was don’t pass the ball, don’t drop the ball, don’t make a mistake - just kept on truckin’.
He stepped Shaun Edwards. He ran through Jack. Edwards came again but couldn’t hold on. Neil bumped off him. So did Hardwick. It was like they all kept him up, re-balancing, re-positioning the great lumbering wildebeest as gravity threatened to bring him down. And when his torso eventually met the earth Jackson somehow, amid a ruck of men, reached out an arm and plunged a dagger directly into Wayne Pearce’s heart.
Sorry, Junior. You’ve been a champion. But it is not to be.
This is Canberra Time.
And the Bear lost his shit.
“He’s there! Try! Try! Steve Jackson reached out and scored what will win the premiership for the Canberra Raiders! I didn’t think there was any way he was going to make that. But he did. What strength! What power! What a Grand Final! What a premiership!”
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